Executive (29 page)

“Fat laugh! No government ever made anything competitive. There's no incentive.”

“Something I've got to tell you—” I began.

“That you're in training to take over? I found out.”

“It wasn't supposed to be a secret,” I protested.

“The damn inefficient paperwork took so long to come down, I might never have been informed,” he said. “But you're such a bright one, I couldn't figure what you were doing here in the bottom echelon. So I inquired.”

“You aren't angry that I didn't tell you?”

“I know why you didn't tell me! You figured you wouldn't learn much if you walked up and said, 'Hey, boss, I'm going to be your boss soon, so watch your step!' ”

“I really hadn't thought of it that way,” I protested.

“I guess you didn't. You're a decent guy; you really want to learn. So you just kept your mouth shut and learned, and I let you. Comes to the same thing. My recommendation's already in; you got a good one, same as it would have been if you'd been for real. You did good work.”

“I tried to,” I said. "But, look—when I do get there, I really do want to turn this company around.

Certainly I'll change the hole-drilling routine. But that's only one facet of a huge operation; I can't learn it all from direct personal experience. So if you have any notions, I want to hear them."

“Thought you'd never ask. I have this bright idea for a new kind of bubble, but nobody'd listen. I think it could put one like this on the market at half the price.”

“A fifty percent saving on a city-bubble? If there's no catch—”

"See, there're a thousand little bubbles down there growing, for every big one. And a lot of fragments.

They don't all grow perfect. Those pieces bobble around a while and drop out; when they're not hollow, they get to weigh too much. But there's a lot of good stuff there. Bubblene is valuable no matter what shape it's in. I figure we could fish out all the little bubbles, twenty feet in diameter, that we throw back now, and some chunks of solid bubblene, and take 'em into a big workshop bubble and melt 'em together so we have maybe a hundred little ones making one big one, like a bagful of balloons, tied in together by the spare bubblene. Put a lock in each one, make it an apartment. The whole thing spins for gee. Can leave the center hollow, even, or use it for storage. Could have a hundred home-bubbles in one big ring, even, spinning for gee. Because they're so much more common than the big, perfect ones, and no complex internal structures are needed, the cost would be much less." He paused to see how I was taking it.

“Makes so much sense, I don't see why they aren't doing it already,” I remarked. “Are you sure there's no catch?”

"If there is, I don't know it. Some apartments are set up isolated, anyway; the people seem to like them.

This is just bigger-scale."

I remembered the apartment complex where I had found Megan twenty years before. Spheres on the ends of rods, the whole complex rotating for gee. Larger bubble arrangements like that, or in other shapes, each apartment separate—I saw nothing against it. “There has to be some reason they wouldn't go for it,” I said. “It makes too much sense to ignore.”

“Well, when you get there, you look up the files and find out which one my suggestion's filed in. Maybe they put the reason there.”

“I will.”

“You'll be moving on now,” he said.

“To the apartment installation crew,” I agreed. “I have to learn something about every facet of this operation.”

“They don't seem to be rushing it much,” he said. “You didn't need to spend a whole month on holes just to learn how it's done.”

“I'm not their choice for top exec,” I confided.

He burst out laughing. “So that's it! They figure if they drag you around in it long enough, you'll get tired and quit.”

“Or foul up, so they can fire me before I get power,” I agreed.

“Why don't they just torpedo you, then? There're lots of ways you can make a person foul up, if you've a mind.”

“I have to wash out legitimately. I think the Tyrancy's getting fed up with bungling, and if they were caught messing up the new boss—”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “Or maybe they're bungling that job, like everything else.” He pondered a moment, then said, “You know, the boys've been staying clear of you, because of what you are. But you seem okay to me. Why don't you come into town with us tonight? You can hear a lot of ideas, if you're really interested.”

I had been aware that there was not much socializing, but since many of the times that I went into town alone or with Amber were actually secret returns to my role as Tyrant, I had found it convenient. Still, I did want to know the pulse of the common man, and this seemed like a good opportunity.

Five of us went stag to a bar and had alcoholic drinks. I was afraid they would also go to a civilian tail, but they knew of my situation with Amber and spared me that. Instead they went to an execution.

I am not sure I have discussed this before. It had been my original intention as Tyrant to eliminate the death penalty for crime, but circumstances had overtaken me. We were undertaking a program to control population, and also to save money. It turned out to be nonsensical to allow old sick folk to die without medication and to prevent new babies from being born, while preserving the lives of murderers. There had turned out to be plenty of lesser criminals to man the inclement space stations: those that had some potential to reform and return eventually to society. So the death penalty had remained, despite my initial misgiving. But with a twist. Roulette had worked this out, and I had lacked the gumption to overrule her.

A large audience had formed for the occasion. Men, women, and even some children. On the stage in front were the prisoner, the judge, and a woman in black: the representative of the victim. The prisoner was bound beside a wall.

“The accused has been found guilty of murdering John Jones, as charged,” the judge said, and his amplified words carried throughout the chamber. “I hereby sentence him to be lasered until dead.” He turned to the woman. “You, Mrs. Jones, widow of the deceased, may execute him yourself.” He handed her a laser rifle.

The woman shied away from it. “Oh, I could not do that!” she protested. There was a murmur of mixed emotion from the audience.

“Then it is your privilege to give the order to the execution squad,” the judge said. At his signal a troop of six men entered, each carrying a laser rifle. They lined up and took aim at the prisoner.

The woman tried, but the sound would not come out of her mouth despite the yelled encouragement of members of the audience. Some were eating candy, I noted. I was disgusted, not so much at them as at myself. How could I have let such a scene be legitimized under my government?

“If you do not choose to take vengeance yourself,” the judge said sternly, “then I shall select at random another person to do it.”

When the woman backed away, demurring, the judge looked out over the audience. His glance passed across the various interested spectators and halted at the one who had the greatest doubt about the proceeding. “You,” he said.

I started. He was speaking to me!

“I can't...” I protested.

“On pain of being found in contempt of this court,” he said firmly, “I direct you to perform this office for the representative of the deceased. Only in this manner will justice be fulfilled.”

Still I hesitated. I had never expected to be tapped for this! Yet it was my doing, however indirect. Was I to lack the stomach to carry out my own policy?

“Do it! Do it! Do it!” the audience chanted.

“Order!” the judge rapped, and the chant faded.

Now his gaze returned to me. “Come up here. Address the execution squad.”

Numbly I mounted the stage. I faced the firing squad. I took a breath. “Fire,” I said.

Six lasers fired. They were heavy-duty; in an instant the body of the prisoner was charred black. It fell to the floor.

A cheer went up. Justice had been served! But somehow I did not find it satisfying.

The judge handed the woman in black a slip of paper. “Here is your certificate for one birth,” he said. “In this manner may the life lost be returned to you.”

That was it. The woman now had permission to have a baby; the paper would gain her a spot antidote to the universal contraceptive in the environment. But how would she conceive it with her husband gone?

The answer became apparent. Already men surrounded the widow, proposing marriage. The demand for the right to procreate was enormous. She might come out of this in better condition than before the murder. If that was what counted.

Suddenly I appreciated on a gut level the common man's objection to the Tyrancy. I was beginning to feel it myself.

I proceeded on through the other stages of my apprenticeship, learning how to install apartment cubes, lay out major halls, organize waste processors, put in power and communications lines, and handle the mountainous paperwork required for every stage. By the time I was ready to assume the helm, more than a year had passed, and I was none too certain I was ready. But I knew it had to be done.

The fundamental problem with Jupiter Bubble Company was that it was huge, impersonal, and inefficient. There was little dedication to speed, price, or quality, and those who attempted to improve these things were either fired or shuffled elsewhere. Paperwork had become an end in itself, and experimentation was discouraged. There were no values, no company spirit. The structure was rotting from the core and didn't seem to care.

On my way up I had taken note of the minority of genuinely dedicated workers and supervisors. My first act as company president was to summon these people for a conference. Gray was among them but only one among many.

“You, all of you, are about to assume the management of this company,” I informed them. “Each of you will be put in charge of a particular aspect or program relevant to your expertise. You will select your own personnel from those remaining in the company and designate their duties. They will answer directly to you, and you will answer directly to me. This will be done personally; if you find it necessary to write a memo, it shall be confined to one page, preferably less. There will be no paperwork, apart from minimum specifications for complex aspects. I trust your judgment, and I will hold you responsible. If you tell me a program is good, I will support it; see that you do not let me down.”

They turned, to each other, not quite knowing what to make of this, but I was serious. I put Gray in charge of the Micro Bubble task force: to develop a viable program for producing the type of small-bubble complex he had described to me, and then to implement it. I put the others in charge of programs relevant to their interests and competencies. I gave them autonomy and authority. I stressed that our company interest, as of that instant, was first for quality and reliability, then for value, then for service to our customers, then for efficiency, and finally for profit. “We shall be losing money for a time,” I admitted. “But we've been losing money for three years; that's nothing new. Once we change, that will change.”

Then I got more personal. “I have come to know you men as I worked in this company,” I said. “But you are the minority. We all know that we have quite a number of inadequately trained and motivated workers and deadwood executives. We are not going to fire any of them, but we are going to demote them. If they wish to leave the company, we'll gladly let them go. But those who stay will be well treated here. We are going to treat every worker as a winner, as someone special. We are going to treat every client as someone special. We are going to care about our people. We are going to be like one giant family. We are going to provide medical assistance for any worker who needs it, and day care for the children of any worker who wants it, and honest counseling for any worker who asks for it. Each of you will be like a parent to your group, and I will be a parent to you and a grandparent to them. We are going to have love here—love of our product and love of our customers and love of each other. We are going to have company-sponsored entertainment. If one employee marries another, we will give them a wedding on company premises at company expense. If one of our employees dies, the company will cover the memorial service and will offer what support we can to the survivors. Religious services and political meetings will be welcome, provided that no proselytizing or recruiting is done on company premises. And we shall sing together.”

Still they gazed at each other uncertainly, half suspecting that I was not serious. The changes I was proposing were too great, too different. They simply didn't know what to make of it. No paperwork?

Weddings on company premises? Singing?

“Now, we are going to make mistakes,” I continued. “That is inevitable. We shall be tolerant of errors, while avoiding total foolishness. We are going to be highly hospitable to new ideas, to innovation, to alternatives. We...”

I paused, for one of the company men had moved quietly to a door and flung it open. A man was revealed there, listening.

“Ah, a spy!” I exclaimed, recognizing the intruder. I had checked out all suspicious characters and knew that this man was in the employ of Saturn, an industrial agent. I had used my facilities as Tyrant privately to get information on him directly from the source: Chairman Khukov had provided it. “Come forward!”

Apprehensively the man approached me. “Comrade, we have nothing to fear from Saturn!” I informed him. "We need have no secrets here. Come to my office in the morning, and I will provide you with any information you desire. I hope that your planet will reciprocate. I appoint you company liaison to Saturn.

Now we shall welcome you warmly." And, as the others stared with astonishment, I began to sing:

“Meadowlands, Meadowlands, meadows green and fields in blossom!” I gestured to the others to join me. Most were blank, but some did know the song; hesitantly they joined in. Gray laughed and sang loudly; he was no Saturnist and loved the joke. In due course we were singing it with greater enthusiasm, and indeed, it is a pretty song.

That, I think, was what broke the ice. After we had sung together we felt more like a family. The people I had chosen began to believe in this seemingly crazy dream of mine, to fathom the way in which it could operate. I stepped off the platform, still singing, and took the hands of those nearest, and they took the hands of others, and soon all of us were linked in a big circle, including the Saturn spy, moving our feet in time and swaying our bodies in a kind of dance. On one level it was indeed crazy, but on another it was the essence of what I wanted: company unity.

I was taking a serious risk in this, and I knew it, but I felt that the importance of the move warranted it.

You see, what I was doing here was very like what I had done as an officer of the Jupiter Navy, thirty years before, and much more recently as Tyrant. Few people had my talent for understanding and influencing others; it was the principal trait that had brought me to the Tyrancy. I was using it freely here, openly for the first time. If any of these caught on...

I think, in retrospect, that it is possible that some did. But if so, they did not betray my identity to others.

Perhaps it was curiosity that moved them, waiting to see what I was up to. Or perhaps they liked what I was doing with the company, so supported it despite their knowledge.

It was very much like chaos at first. Our output and our cost-effectiveness plummeted. But I had expected this, and I had had a good deal of experience in this sort of thing. The new lines of command rapidly took form, and as the new formations formed, the work improved. Naturally, great numbers of employees left, in perplexity or horror, but we worked to keep the ones we really wanted. Always we fostered the feeling of family, of total commitment and support, of the importance of every single person associated with Jupiter Bubble. We stressed endlessly the concurrent commitments to quality. Every worker became a quality control expert, passing on no work that was not, in his judgment, up to snuff.

We hired personnel to take care of the increasing number of children in the day-care unit. There were none under two years of age, because of the procreation cutoff, but women with children in the three- to five-year-old range flocked to our banner, because here they could work for a fair wage without having to sacrifice their children. A number of them were quite competent, and they were dedicated from the start.

We also attracted creative males: those who had been stifled at other companies, who wanted to be respected, to have their novel notions seriously considered, and to feel important. We soon had capacity employment, and a waiting list developed for potential employees. Indeed, they liked it here—not for superior pay, for our scale was standard, but for the feeling of worth as individuals they experienced here. In return they gave us their best effort, and in an amazingly brief time the benefits accrued.

Of course, I am oversimplifying here; there were endless details to cover and continuing minor crises to accommodate, and the process took years. But Spirit ran the Tyrancy while I made spot appearances as Tyrant, and Amber was the appropriate contrast to the stresses of company and Tyrancy management, being a completely malleable young woman who lived only to please me. It may be unkind to say it, but had my other lives been anything other than hectic, I would soon have gotten bored with Amber. But as it was, she represented a calm haven and constant sop to my aging masculine ego, and I found I could live with that. Oh, true, at times I dreamed of the glories of my past life, when Helse had initiated me into the magic realms of sex and love, when Emerald had managed my Navy career toward the apex, and when fiery Roulette had dazzled me... as perhaps she still did. But I knew I was no longer fifteen, or twenty-two, or thirty; I was passing my mid-fifties, and physically and sexually I was not the man I had been. Emotionally and intellectually I remained viable, I trusted. The proof of my current manhood was in the progress of the company—and that was part of the progress of the Tyrancy.

But at this stage that proof was far from apparent. When I was about a year into my presidency of the company, a significant event occurred, though I was not to appreciate just how significant for another year. My business took me to the great city of Cago, in the State of Prairie, a center for the food industry. I had a peripheral interest in food production, a matter I shall go into in due course. I was traveling as Jose Garcia, of course; it would hardly have been feasible as Tyrant.

I had just about concluded my business when the trouble started. I was departing the mayor's office, having taken care of some paperwork, and saw that a demonstration was in progress. Curious, I joined the throng in the main hall to watch. The demonstrators were mostly young, and a number of them—perhaps the majority—were female. They held placards proclaiming, GIVE US OUR BABIES

and NIX ON NULL-POP!

Now I understood. These were the first people who felt the onus of the population control measure now in force. I knew that it was necessary to halt the exploding population of the System, and that the United States of Jupiter could not dictate population control to the other nations of the planet; we had to set the example ourselves. That was working, but at this stage, the benefits were less apparent than the sacrifice.

The festering slum-cities of RedSpot, the result of overpopulation that depleted its resources, seemed far away, while the denial of babies to the families of Cago seemed immediate. Naturally they felt it keenly. I understood this, but, of course, the policy could not be changed until planetary growth had been gotten under control. So the young would-be mothers marched in protest, and they certainly looked ready to reproduce. As Tyrant I knew why this had to be, but as Garcia, I had sympathy for their cause.

I knew that such demonstrations had been increasing, for as women grew older, their chances of bearing healthy children diminished, and their desperation increased. The ban on babies would be lifted in due course, but for some women, that would be too late. The situation had been especially serious here in Cago; I had been warned of this before I traveled here, but that had not dissuaded me from getting my business done. There had been some un-pretty episodes.

There was one today. As I watched, a quite comely young woman strode to the entrance to the mayor's complex, carrying a suitcase. The police guards at the entrance watched, evidently more interested in her appearance than her message.

The woman stood before the entrance, set down her case, and removed her blouse. One guard had taken a step, about to escort her away from the region, but stopped. What man would interfere with a beautiful woman in the process of disrobing before him?

Disrobe she did. In moments she stood gloriously naked. Then she stretched out her arms. “What use is this body to me if I cannot have my baby?” she cried. Then she bent to touch a stud on the case.

“Watch out!” a guard cried. “That's a bomb!”

The guards charged, but the case had been activated. It flared, bathing the woman in intense light.

“No—that's an incendiary laser!” I exclaimed, starting forward myself.

All of us were too late. The woman shrieked as her skin was scorched from her body, a thin veil of smoke rising. Those lasers were used to incinerate garbage, eliminating the problem of collection and disposal; they were normally set at intervals in residential areas, for neighborhoods to use. This one had evidently been partially dismantled, its protective housing removed, so that it represented a danger to the user.

The woman fell, writhing. Her hair and much of her skin had been burned away, and she was dying in as painful a manner as was possible. The two guards stood over her body, appalled. So was I; I was sure that her medical expense limit had been used up, so that she would not be treated. She would certainly die, which was what she had intended.

“What a waste!” one grunted. “Body like that—”

“Pigs!” a woman in the crowd cried, and hurled a fruit.

The guard whirled, drawing his sidearm. His laser flashed, and someone in the crowd screamed.

I did not see much more than that, for I was making a hasty retreat. I knew that real trouble was about to flare, and for my own safety I wanted to win clear of it while that was possible.

For a while I wasn't sure of that possibility. The immolation had electrified the crowd, and the lasering of a demonstrator had galvanized it to action. All manner of objects were flying at the mayor's office now: vegetables, shoes, coins, and even feces.

More guards rushed out of the office complex, lasers drawn. More beams were fired, and there were more screams amid the crowd. I ducked low, knowing that anything could happen, while the missiles and beams crossed over me. I found myself beside a young woman, a demonstrator, who had similar sense.